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Millennials are the public library system’s biggest customers

Gotham Magazine And Palm Bay International Host A Rare Wine Tasting And Charity Auction Photo by Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images for Gotham Magazine
Constance Grady is a senior correspondent on the Culture team for Vox, where since 2016 she has covered books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater.

Welcome to the weekly Vox book link roundup, a curated selection of the best online writing about books and related topics. Here’s the best the internet has to offer for the week of June 18, 2017.

Peele has found a concrete metaphor for the ultimate unspoken fear: that to be oppressed is not so much to be hated as obscenely loved. Disgust and passion are intertwined. Our antipathies are simultaneously a record of our desires, our sublimated wishes, our deepest envies. The capacity to give birth or to make food from one’s body; perceived intellectual, physical, or sexual superiority; perceived intimacy with the natural world, animals, and plants; perceived self-sufficiency in a faith or in a community. There are few qualities in others that we cannot transform into a form of fear and loathing in ourselves.

A lot of YA books I read have main characters who read like they’re in college already. They rarely rely on family, they smoke, and they go on crazy road trips.

I admit this is a really tricky one for writers to capture, because most teenagers THINK that they’re twenty-somethings. Here’s the trick to teenagers: All of us are trying to be older than we really are. As I’ve mentioned before, teenagers are weird creatures. You feel like you’re too young to do anything of importance, so you try to act older. Because it’s cool. Because it makes you feel like you have things under control.

Charlotte would do well in a home where three square meals are placed in front of her each day. She would also benefit from being reminded to shower and having her phone confiscated at night. She’d make a great companion for anyone seeking a poorly adjusted, emotionally unavailable woman to sit in a chair in the corner and stare at her laptop while mumbling.

"'Beach reads' are generally considered fluff pieces for fluff readers, which is a coded way of saying 'lady books for lady readers,'" said Alexandra Franklin, assistant to literary agent Vicky Bijour, echoing many of the responses I received on social media. Which, she added, is a designation that makes her very uncomfortable. "For some reason when I think 'beach reads' I usually think of 'women's fiction,' but when someone mentions an 'airport book' or 'airplane read' I usually think of mass market 'men's' thrillers, like Tom Clancy."

Though hardly anyone knows it, the first person ever to attach their name to a poetic composition is not a mystery. Enheduanna was born more than 4,200 years ago and became the high priestess of a temple in what we now call southern Iraq. She wrote poems, edited hymnals, and may have taught other women at the temple how to write. Archaeologists discovered her in the 1920s and her works were published in English beginning in the 1960s. Yet, rarely if ever does she appear in history textbooks.

Happy reading!